Publisher's Synopsis
'And I fear winter because it is the season of comfort,' wrote Rimbaud. Winter intensified the rigours of poverty; it was in the season of goodwill that he felt most alienated from the world. Yet finally it was Christmas that gave him new hope, though his questions remained unanswered: When would there be 'Christmas on Earth'? Most of the poems in The Season of Comfort are set in winter. For Vincent Morrison, this is a fruitful time to observe people in a physical landscape; he is alive to the ambiguities and ironies embodied in his subjects, but his sensitive eye also catches their touches of humanity. In the title poem, past and present, divine and secular, are ironically juxtaposed; his uncertainty echoes Rimbaud's, but whereas Rimbaud re-created his vision through dense symbolism, Vincent Morrison explores a physically recognisable world which contains his frame of reference: 'Above the turquoise slates of Aloaha/ a floodlight like the moon, or David's star.' Some poems recall winters in North-East England, but Morrison does not limit himself to personal experience; others delve into imagined situations, sometimes with hints of the surreal. One evokes the winter of 1953 in New York, with Dylan Thomas figuring almost as an aside ('Prosepoem in November'), while another pictures a scene on a train packed with Russian Jews bound for Palestine ('The Schonau Express'). Sometimes austere, but always feeling, these poems mark the appearance of a new talent. The cold has 'made' another poet.
